RSS Tips

If you are running any blog (WordPress or not), you know how difficult can it be sometimes to get your RSS subscription rate up. A lot of people still don’t feel comfortable enough with RSS feeds, and a lot of them just ignore RSS subscription buttons. So what can you do to improve your subscription rate? You can put your button in front of your visitors and also provide them with other ways to subscribe to your feed. Here is how:

Position: put your RSS feed where it matters. Put your RSS feed either on the top right or left side of your page. Don’t put RSS feed all the way down your pages as people will not notice it. You can of course check services such as CrazyEgg to create heat maps for your pages and put your RSS boxes where your users pay more attention to.

Call To Action: don’t be shy to ask your users specifically to subscribe to your RSS feed. Use services such as Feedburner to create graphical representations for your RSS feed and specifically ask them to sign up after each and every post.

Bribe: give your user a bribe of some sort. A chance to win $200 or a free report that they can download if they sign up to your RSS feed. Giving away things usually gets the most stubborn people to sign up for your service.

RSS E-mail: use services such as Feedburner to allow people to subscribe to your feeds via e-mail. Believe it or not a lot of people still use e-mails to keep in touch with the latest news in their industry.

Enhance WordPress: this is my favorite strategy. If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you have a huge advantage over other people who don’t have the luxury of having access to functionalities that WordPress has to offer. Besides, you have access to a community of people who are determined to help WordPress stay as the No. 1 content management system around. Use plugins such as WWSGD plugin to ask new visitors to sign up for your RSS. You want to put your RSS subscription links in front of people, but you don’t want to go overboard. Fortunately, there are many plugins you can use to make WordPress super’er. Use WordPress to your advantage.

The freebie approach has worked the best for me but it could be different for you based on your niche or your blog design. But as long as your provide good solid content you are 80% on your way to achieving a huge RSS subscriber list.